Monday, February 25, 2019

Long-Term Project Workflow

264 points, Final Typeface Design (due exam day, Tues. Apr. 30 at 8am): making the letters, numbers, punctuation, and/or other glyphs, with 52 glyphs in all and vectorizing them in Illustrator (any/all type must be vectorized, even if you have made it with pen and ink or a brush); handlettering is also acceptable but must be digitized in some way; students will also create a spec sheet (all of the glyphs on a single format, showing every glyph they've made), a branding board that has the name of their font, and three capabilities with your design used in 3 ways (may be any or all of the following, print, digital, 3d, environment, etc.)

See the class calendar for critiques, deadlines, and milestones.

Required Reading, Playing:

Create a total of 52 glyphs: Letters, Numbers, Punctuation, Symbols, Flourishes, Alternate Characters. Glyphs shall be delivered as vectorized character outlines, produced in Adobe Illustrator, saved as outlines in both Adobe Illustrator (AI) and Adobe Acrobat (PDF) formats. Letters may be drawn or painted first, scanned in for vectorization, and handed in as AI and PDF files. Letters may also begin in Illustrator, as pure vector files.

Character Options: students must create 52 characters in all, and can choose one of the following approaches
  1. 26 uppercase, 26 lowercase
  2. unicase - 26 uppercase, plus others* (see below for full list): numerals 0-9, punctuation, swashes, and/or other characters
  3. unicase - 26 lowercase, plus others* (see below for full list): numerals 0-9, punctuation, swashes, and/or other characters
  4. any option not listed above must be approved by the instructor
*the 26 others
  1. items 2 and 3 below are required for the others, and students may choose from items 4-11 for their additional characters
  2. digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
  3. punctuation: periods, commas, open/closing quotes, apostrophes, colons, semicolons
  4. alternate characters, such as various styles of one or more letters, see Amanda Moore's Tonic from last term as an example
  5. swashes, such as stylized ampersands (&) or upper- and lower-case letters
  6. fractions: ½, ⅓, ⅔, ¼, ¾
  7. math symbols, multiplication, plus, divide
  8. currency symbols, US, EU, Asia, UK currency marks
  9. miscellaneous: copyright, registration, trademark, servicemark, diamonds, arrows, octothorp, pilcrow
  10. crosses: Roman, Orthodox, Celtic
  11. Latin accents: grave, acute, circumflex, tilde, diaeresis, ring, macron, breve, ogonek, caron, etc.
Final Deliverables. In addition to creating your font, students are expected to create the following to market their typeface and give it a personality. The model for the items below is the Lost Type Co-op, where they have name boards in their browse section. Note: all sizes below are in points, so size your layouts accordingly. You can build these in any program (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign), but note the file requirements asked for when turning in the work.

A. Multiple Spec Sheets: 842 pixels wide by 597 pixels high, 300dpi, RGB, TIFF—will include all 52 of your characters, can be color, should have your name, as the designer also listed in the layout, as well as the font's name too. This is noted as Multiple, as in many spec sheets because some students may need to show more than one spec sheet, especially those with layered typefaces. But these are the ones you are required to show:
  • black text on white ground
  • white text on black ground
  • others (as needed) perhaps colored for layer effect

The following works in sections B and C shall be assessed and counted as a separate grade from your letter design work.

B. One Brand Board: 700 pixels wide by 300 pixels high, 300dpi, RGB, TIFF—this will have the name of your typeface on it, and use materials and color in order to promote a look and feel, the character if you will, of your font. Consider how a background image, faint or full, or texture, can add to that character. 

C. Three Capabilities Layouts: your typeface used in situation, and applied to a layout or other design application; the application should be appropriate, meaning it makes sense as it's applied; an example of an inappropriate application would be Comic Sans used on the resume of a banker, which would look rather dubious; format may be rectangular as portrait or landscape, may also be square in shape, but cannot be any smaller than 500 points in any one direction, must be 300dpi and RGB, TIFF; examples include but are not limited to: billboards, wordmarks and other brand identity, tabular layouts such as stock information, album covers, posters, bumper stickers, book covers, eight track cassette tapes, vinyl record labels, CD cases, railroad signage, trading post signage, stationery, envelopes, rock band poster, classical music posters, toy packaging, real estate advertisement and/or identity, cigarette packaging or advertisement, cigar packaging or advertisement, alcohol packaging or advertisement, etc., etc.

Worth 264 points total, with category points as follows:
  • 20 craft
  • 124 composition of glyphs, including legibility and overall unity of 52 in the set
  • 20 research and development
  • 40 presentation and professionalism
  • 60 capabilities designs, collateral's quality, composition, rendering
  • detailed assessment criteria will be shared in-class
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